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Tag: Success

Clear Project Goals = Better Team Relationships

Written by Paul Crosby on . Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Clear Project Goals = Better Team Relationships

We hear those words regularly: “We need to be more competitive!” Competition is good and competition is bad.

When it’s your company’s product against another companies’ product, it is good. When competition is within your team, it is not so good. Things go wrong, and things become less than productive. Team Members are so busy trying to sabotage and undermine each other they forget the reason they were all brought together in the first place – to make things happen. The best teams work together with common goals and objectives to be productive. It’s sort of a 3 musketeer approach: “One for All and All for One”.

A common goal that is well understood is the best way to start a project. It brings clarity to the project team members at the beginning of the project. In reality we start projects were ideas are not fully developed, there are competing goals and there is outright confusion as to why the project team is even in the room in the first place.

What if a project started with a clear goal in mind? Maybe even the business value was well understood too. How about this example:

We are undertaking the consolidation of the Filbert, Dogbert and Wally CRM systems into a single CRM system because the contact center is having difficulty getting a true picture of where a customer is within the sales cycle. We need to establish a scoring system for potential customers in order to focus our contact center agents on customers who are more likely to purchase our products. This will reduce marketing costs by 50%, reduce call length times by 20% and improve our contact center agent’s ability to service our potential customers in an expedited manner. Additionally, our contact center agents will be able to see all potential and current customers in one system and avoid having to switch between multiple systems to locate a customer.

Does the paragraph above sound like a good goal? It’s pretty good because it does contain the problem statement and the business value in one paragraph. It tells a story about why the team is together. It’s also short enough to ramble off in a hallway conversation with an executive. Focus on getting a common goal that is clear to the entire team. Don’t get caught up on explaining the scope in words – try thinking outside the box and use a context diagram or other type of diagram. Remember a picture is worth a thousand words.

If the goal were stated as, “We are going to consolidate CRM systems.” It would cause more confusion that anything else. It does not answer the question “Why?” because the goal is not clearly understood the team will be confused immediately at the start of the project.

Hold on there cowboy! That goal sounds like a solution. Being specific about a goal can sound like a solution so care needs to be taken to avoid having a goal point to a specific solution. We need to be careful about how these goal statements are crafted to not sound like a solution.

A task list is not a goal. A common goal is more than a list of tasks to complete or items on a checklist. It is about the journey and the destination. How you get there and take your journey as a team is as important as arriving at the destination with the desired results. Productive teams get this and start their journey together by defining the journey. “Guys, HOW are we going to get there? Agile? Waterfall? Scrumban? Combinations of one or more?”.

Think about it a bit. You get assigned to a project and have that first meeting with the project team. Does the team have a conversation about the path the project will take? Does the question “How will we get there?” ever get answered? The conversation typically winds up being, “We will talk about that later when we have more details” or “We just follow the PMO process.” I have shown up to quite a few meetings where the project schedule and tasks were already determined – all without input from the team.

Milestones are not the path to success. They are just points along the journey. Keep in mind that when you reach a milestone successfully that your customers don’t say much about your success. “Wow this new 3 dimensional printer is so fast” or “Look at the stuff I can do with it”. No customer has ever said “Thankfully ABC company completed design on March 30th and moved into development using the waterfall methodology to build that new 3D printer.” Seriously I would break out a cold dead trout and slap them with it if that was said. The success here isn’t the fact there were deadlines – obviously there were deadlines and milestones – but rather the product experience by the customer.

Build the shared goal to start your projects off right. The concepts outlined in this article are a small part of Enterprise Analysis and building solid business cases for projects.

Clear Project Goals = Better Team Relationships

Written by Paul Crosby on . Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Clear Project Goals = Better Team Relationships

We hear those words regularly: “We need to be more competitive!” Competition is good and competition is bad. When it’s your company’s product against another companies’ product, it is good.

When competition is within your team, it is not so good. Things go wrong, and things become less than productive. Team Members are so busy trying to sabotage and undermine each other they forget the reason they were all brought together in the first place – to make things happen. The best teams work together with common goals and objectives to be productive.

It’s sort of a 3 musketeer approach: “One for All and All for One”.

A common goal that is well understood is the best way to start a project. It brings clarity to the project team members at the beginning of the project. In reality we start projects were ideas are not fully developed, there are competing goals and there is outright confusion as to why the project team is even in the room in the first place.

What if a project started with a clear goal in mind? Maybe even the business value was well understood too. How about this example:

We are undertaking the consolidation of the Filbert, Dogbert and Wally CRM systems into a single CRM system because the contact center is having difficulty getting a true picture of where a customer is within the sales cycle. We need to establish a scoring system for potential customers in order to focus our contact center agents on customers who are more likely to purchase our products. This will reduce marketing costs by 50%, reduce call length times by 20% and improve our contact center agent’s ability to service our potential customers in an expedited manner. Additionally, our contact center agents will be able to see all potential and current customers in one system and avoid having to switch between multiple systems to locate a customer.

Does the paragraph above sound like a good goal? It’s pretty good because it does contain the problem statement and the business value in one paragraph. It tells a story about why the team is together. It’s also short enough to ramble off in a hallway conversation with an executive. Focus on getting a common goal that is clear to the entire team. Don’t get caught up on explaining the scope in words – try thinking outside the box and use a context diagram or other type of diagram.

Remember a picture is worth a thousand words.

If the goal were stated as, “We are going to consolidate CRM systems.” It would cause more confusion that anything else. It does not answer the question “Why?” because the goal is not clearly understood the team will be confused immediately at the start of the project.

Hold on there cowboy! That goal sounds like a solution. Being specific about a goal can sound like a solution so care needs to be taken to avoid having a goal point to a specific solution. We need to be careful about how these goal statements are crafted to not sound like a solution.

A task list is not a goal. A common goal is more than a list of tasks to complete or items on a checklist. It is about the journey and the destination. How you get there and take your journey as a team is as important as arriving at the destination with the desired results. Productive teams get this and start their journey together by defining the journey. “Guys, HOW are we going to get there? Agile? Waterfall? Scrumban? Combinations of one or more?”.

Think about it a bit. You get assigned to a project and have that first meeting with the project team. Does the team have a conversation about the path the project will take? Does the question “How will we get there?” ever get answered? The conversation typically winds up being, “We will talk about that later when we have more details” or “We just follow the PMO process.” I have shown up to quite a few meetings where the project schedule and tasks were already determined – all without input from the team.

Milestones are not the path to success. They are just points along the journey. Keep in mind that when you reach a milestone successfully that your customers don’t say much about your success. “Wow this new 3 dimensional printer is so fast” or “Look at the stuff I can do with it”. No customer has ever said “Thankfully ABC company completed design on March 30th and moved into development using the waterfall methodology to build that new 3D printer.” Seriously I would break out a cold dead trout and slap them with it if that was said. The success here isn’t the fact there were deadlines – obviously there were deadlines and milestones – but rather the product experience by the customer.

Build the shared goal to start your projects off right. The concepts outlined in this article are a small part of Enterprise Analysis and building solid business cases for projects.

Emotional Process – Using Emotional Intelligence for Process Mapping

Written by Yasar Ajlouni on . Posted in Articles.

The signs are not always easy to spot. A clearly uncomfortable shift in the chair.  Scowling at the conversation. 

Pushing away from the table and away from the conversation.  All in response to the question, “What process does your team use?”  Being aware of the different emotional states of the team members involved in the process mapping is a skill that can make your process modeling easy or painfully difficult. 

How can Emotional Intelligence help create better processes?

Process mapping or process modeling visually describes a set of activities in a process. The representations or illustration can describe either how work is done (As Is) or could be done (To Be). In addition to detailing the sequence of activities in a process for better understanding; process models may have other benefits and applications, including serving as a tool for better planning and communication.

Capturing the process information can be done through an interview, workshop or direct observation.  Each method has its pros and cons, and several of these techniques require carefully managed human interaction. Emotional Intelligence plays a vital role for the Process Analyst and Business Analyst. Emotional management in conducting interviews or holding workshops is a subset of Emotional Intelligence can thus be considered a winning strategy during process mapping. As the Process Analyst could work across all functions and departments within an organization, relationship management becomes more critical to harvest the right information from the right people. 

The four branch model of Emotional Intelligence describes the 4 primary skills that are part of Emotional Intelligence. These 4 primary skills involve the abilities to accurately perceive emotions in yourself and recognize them in others, use emotions to facilitate thinking, understand emotional meanings, and manage emotions effectively.

For processing mapping understanding these 4 areas and how they can be used to elicit the process mapping accurately is an important skill.

Body language tells a lot about all of us and if the analyst is giving mixed signals, the recipient might lose interest in giving out more than just what is sufficient. The Process Analyst or Business Analyst should be aware of the body language they are using in meetings and conducting workshops.  A natural and casual sense of curiosity is useful for a workshop or interview.  Curiosity is demonstrated in asking more questions and not jumping to conclusions that are negative in nature. Capitalizing on social awareness and body language is a skill to that will provide brilliant feedback. An inquisitive tone, can build trust, a judgmental one can do the exact opposite.  Careful attention to the tone of your voice is helpful in ensuring you are not “talking down” to colleagues providing you process information.

Individuals can act differently during an information capturing sessions. Individuals can either be onboard or simply not interested in many ways including body language and tone of voice. Using very collaborative techniques such as a whiteboard or post-it notes where everyone can interact in a hands-on manner significantly improves the ability to elicit a process more fully. Visual interaction assists individuals that are part of the process in understanding their process steps more fully but also those of others that are involved in the process.  Visualization creates a story telling environment where history and prior decisions are more clearly understood.

Another subset of Emotional Intelligence is self-management which is the ability to be aware of our emotions and to choose what we say and do. Process mapping requires an analyst to be in control and make the experience of process mapping a positive experience. Maintain a positive attitude and facilitate the discussion not allowing individuals to take over the process mapping activity with negative feedback.  Facilitation requires solid ground rules for the meeting that are agreed upon by all.  Ground rules create a more positive collaborative environment.

The person being interviewed for the process mapping may get defensive and will not help when caught off guard.  Good preparation and setting expectations for the interview meeting is a critical success factor for the analyst. Create the positive experience from the very beginning to gain better results throughout the process mapping experience.

Change can be frustrating to an analyst as new tasks are discovered or tagged as no longer needed.  The best way to deal with this is to be prepared for a change in each session to allow for corrections and improvements.  Give yourself space and time to handle changes and corrections that often occur during the process modeling experience.  Actively manage those changes by identifying them, determining if they are valid and acting on them.  Keep a change log for your process mapping experience to identify the changes.  This helps you keep organized to know which changes are being reviewed, which as approved and which were rejected.  A good change log can prevent having the same conversation over and over on the same change.

Being aware of body language, collaborative interaction and managing change effectively are good steps to improving your next process mapping meeting.

Experience is the Best Teacher Reflect on Your Actions Taken

Written by Clinton Ages on . Posted in Articles.

Welcome to the last episode of the Coach Clinton 7-Steps to Accomplishment Methodology –finally!

Those of you who have been with me throughout this journey deserve my heartiest congratulations because now you are equipped with the knowledge to achieve anything you want in life. The only limit is your ambitions otherwise nothing is beyond your reach – provided that you follow the entire process just like I described.

Before we fit in the last piece of the achievement jigsaw puzzle, let us list down the first 6 steps:

Step 1 – Appraise your performance
Step 2 – Ascertain your goals and priorities
Step 3 – Approach your goal achievement plan
Step 4 – Avert negativity with your motivation affirmation
Step 5 – Actualize your goals by getting into action
Step 6 – Attain your goals and reward yourself

Now we start with the last step…

Step 7 – Analyze Results

This last step is one of the most important step of the 7-step methodology. After going through great pains and achieving your goals, you need to sit down and analyze the entire process. If you don’t do that, you will have to reinvent the wheel every time you start working on the next goal.

This step helps you learn from your mistakes and helps you identify your strong points so that you can avoid the mistakes and focus on the strengths. Result? Swifter achievement of your goals with lesser mistakes – thus achieving Elevation Exceleration!

This step, as known as Analyze Results, is all about extracting the value of learning from the actions that you have taken while striving toward your goals. It is of utmost importance to learn from past actions. Have you heard the phrase ‘hindsight is 20/20’? It makes perfect sense because once an event has occurred, it becomes very easy to analyze it and see what went wrong with it whereas it is almost impossible to predict something that may happen in the future. Even the best project managers struggle to predict and manage risk. So, it seems a wise thing to use your 20/20 hindsight and assess your actions. This simple action can significantly increase your chances of success in the future.

Whether your venture has been a complete success, a moderate success, a disappointing failure, or anything in between, you must sit down and analyze all your actions using your hindsight. Whether you succeed or not, this analysis will give you valuable insights and help you win next time. If you think you have been successful, evaluating the entire effort will help you see which of your actions were right that led you to this success. In future, you can replicate your success by using the same strategies and actions.

The significance of analyzing your mistakes can be understood by a John Powell’s quote: “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” Although he is a film composer, I find his take on mistakes quite extraordinary. According to John’s definition, a mistake is only the one which we fail to analyze and pick up our lesson from. In essence, mistakes are great learning opportunities, in disguise.

I seriously hope that now you realize that analyzing your mistakes is a mandatory step of the self-improvement process. To do this effectively, I’m giving you a few practical tips from my years of experience coaching others:

Analyze every time

Like I said earlier, whether it is a breakthrough success or an utter failure, there is no exemption from the hindsight analysis part. There is no room for any excuse that can allow you to skip this extremely important step.

Record your mistakes in detail

Make it a point to go through all the events in greater detail and see which actions were correct and which ones need to be marked for review. Pay attention to the actions and decisions that could have been altered to get better results. The key here is to go in sufficient detail and not to let any detail slip through the cracks.

Accept mistakes

Since this activity is for your own improvement, you should not be afraid of openly accepting your mistakes. Providing yourself with false comfort at this stage will definitely lead you to pay much higher cost of making further mistakes in the future. The best thing is to accept your mistakes with an open mind.

Reasons vs excuses

As a human being, we unconsciously fix the blame of our mistakes on external factors and save ourselves from guilt. It is important to be a little more objective with yourself and not to confuse between genuinely justified reasons for a failure and baseless excuses just to let yourself loose. A better option is to blame yourself for every mistake and then try to take off the blame by using factual justifications only.

Seek help

It is time to acknowledge the fact that nobody is a master of everything. We have made mistakes but there is no shame in seeking the help of someone who is better at doing something – someone who is a specialist of that particular area. Do your due diligence to find the best source of help and ask for help without feeling the unnecessary guilt of not knowing something.

Ask yourself the right questions

Asking yourself the right questions is a great way to get educational value from your mistakes. These questions should be able to capture the exact mistakes and turn them into valuable lessons for the future. Here are a few questions to get you started:

  • Did this turn out the way I visualized?
  • What didn’t go so well?
  • What mistake(s) did I make?
  • What was the outcome of my mistake?
  • What type of additional planning do I think could have helped me?
  • What exactly can I learn from this?
  • What can I do in the future to avoid this type of result again?
  • Which skills or resources will I need to handle this type of situations more effectively?
  • What changes can I make in my approach to improve future results?

By following these points, I’m sure you can convert your mistakes into great opportunities. After following this methodology for a few times to achieve different goals, you will see yourself getting better at this and you will even look forward to embarking on your next endeavor.

To conclude this series of discussions, I would urge you again to stop procrastinating and start chasing your dreams and ambitions using the Coach Clinton 7-Steps to Accomplishment Methodology. As the results will start to pour in, I’m sure you will thank yourself for taking this initiative.

Best of luck!

10 Tips for a Better Business Analyst Project Manager Relationship

Written by Chileshe Mulenga on . Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on 10 Tips for a Better Business Analyst Project Manager Relationship

The business analyst and project manager are team players on a project.

As is common the business analyst and project manager sometimes have conflicting approaches during a project.
Having frequently taken up dual roles of a project manager and business analyst during the course of my career, I have gained some insight on the dos and don’ts for a business analyst to work effectively with a project manager
The following are the 10 tips that I recommend for any successful BA/PM relationship.

TIP 1 – Collaborative Stakeholder Analysis

The key to your success as a business analyst on any project is identifying your key stakeholders and having a good understanding of their interests and levels of influence.
From my experience, this is a task best done in collaboration with your project manager to ensure you speak the same language when it comes to managing your stakeholders.
Imagine a situation where you haven’t captured the requirements a highly influential stakeholder already identified to your project manager. Missing requirements could result in unwanted reworks on the project, increased costs, and project delays.

TIP 2 – Synchronize Your Business Analysis Plan with the Project Schedule

It is good to ensure that the activity dates of your business analysis plan are incorporated or synchronized with the project manager’s project schedule. Nothing is worse than discovering that the period of time the project manager has allocated for your business analysis activities is insufficient.

TIP 3 – Not All Requirements can be Captured Up Front.

Many business analysts discover that as much as the intention may be to capture all requirements up front before the execution phase, there are actually very few cases where this is possible. During execution, it is common that stakeholders bring up forgotten requirements. The good news is that usually, the project manager will define the acceptance criteria with the client. The acceptance criteria is an agreement of what the product or service should constitute for it to be accepted by the client. The acceptance criteria are usually part of the signed off project charter. Other project managers may use the Agile approach where prioritized requirements are implemented in phases. A BA must accept the fact that in most cases not all requirements will be captured up front.

TIP 4 – Non-Functional Requirements vs. Project Scope

As business analysts, we also capture non-functional requirements i.e. the expected efficiency level of a system. It is good to liaise with your Project Manager on what is out of scope for the Project. It is common that non-functional requirements requested by stakeholders are sometimes not feasible due to budget and time constraints. You need to be on the same page with your project manager on what is out of scope. This is to avoid complicating the management of your stakeholder expectations

TIP 5 – Help to Minimize Scope Creep

As business analysts, we know that stakeholders may request additional requirements during the course of the project. As business analysts, a new requirement is accepted or rejected depending on whether it can be directly linked to the business need. However, business analysts need to remember that the project manager aims to minimize new additions to the project scope (scope creep) that will require the adjustment of the project budget and schedule. In most cases, stakeholders are not willing to incur the increased cost or time required for inclusion of new requirements.

TIP 6 – All Changes to Requirements Undergo Impact Analysis

Whilst carrying out the requirements management and communications process, the business analyst must ensure that changes to requirements go through the impact analysis process managed by the project manager. This is to ensure that the impact that a change in requirement will have on the project schedule, project cost or product quality is assessed before the requirement change is formally approved.

TIP 7 – Collaborative Prioritization of Requirements

Prioritization of requirements is a standard task that we carry out as business analysts under requirements analysis. However, it is common to reach a roadblock where stakeholders wish to classify all their requirements as a high priority. This is usually due to the fear that non-high priority requirements will be excluded in the project scope. With this in mind, it is recommended that prioritization of requirements is done with the involvement of the project manager to assist in the management of your stakeholders.

TIP 8 – Synchronize the List of Prioritized Requirements With the Vendor Selection Criteria

Selection of vendors is a procurement management task that requires the input of the business analyst. Selection of vendors is usually based on each vendor being evaluated against the vendor selection criteria defined by the project manager. It is crucial that the business analyst ensures that the vendor selection criteria is synchronized with the list of prioritized requirements.

TIP 9 – Transition Requirements Can Sometimes Be Implemented as Post-GO-LIVE Tasks

Business analysts also capture transition requirements i.e. the required training of users. For a business analyst, a project is complete when all the categories of requirements i.e. transition requirements have been implemented. However, what is sometimes experienced is the project manager wishes to separate the implementation of transition requirements from the project scope and treat transition requirements as post-GO-Live tasks. This is usually the case when the project has a non-negotiable constraint on the GO-Live date.

TIP 10 – Factor in Project Manager’s Constraints and Assumptions When the Defining the Solution Scope

The business analyst defines the solution scope under the process of enterprise analysis. It is critical that the business analysts gains the input of the project manager on constraints and assumptions before defining the solution scope.

To work effectively with a project manager, a business analyst has understand how the project manager views the project. The business analyst needs to understand aspects of stakeholder analysis , project schedule , project scope , managing scope change , vendor selection criteria and project constraints from the eyes of a project manager.